Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Unpublished Atlas Shrugged Scene

It was on the evening before his departure, that they sat alone together, in a hidden corner, by the edge of the water. A rocky hill rose in a bend at the river ahead. There were long, thin strips of fire in the sky beyond the black rock--and red sparks floating lazily on the water.

Francisco pointed ahead and asked, "Dagny, if you walked around the turn of that rock, what would you expect to find there?"

Dagny said, "Something exciting and wonderful."

He chuckled, nodding, and said, "So do I. So does everybody else. That is what people always expect to find around every corner they turn. And they're always disappointed. But you and I won't be. We know something they've never discovered. When we turn a corner, there will always be something exciting and wonderful there: we will be there."

Dagny laughed, lying stretched on the soft, pine needles of the shore. She had no desire to turn any corner right now.

He said, "We'll never go seeking anything. We'll make it. Just remember that that's the difference between us and everybody else."

He sat, half-stretched, propped up on his elbows. She put her head in the crook of his arm and lay looking peacefully up at the sky. She felt what she had never felt before: contented and lazy. She felt that only here, only with him and under his protection, was it proper for her to let herself feel such a strange thing as rest.

--a young Francisco d'Anconia and Dagny Taggart, in a written but unpublished scene from Atlas Shrugged.